IT students contribute to sustainable shipping

News:
Jun 02, 2017

'I’ve been in this business since 1990, working on ships, as a pilot and today I’m deputy harbour master at the Port of Gothenburg. And I just want to say that the last two hours have been very educational for me.'

Erik Waller, Port of Gothenburg, stands in front of 60 students from University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology in Visual Arena at Lindholmen Science Park. The students have just demonstrated their input to PortCDM, a concept in the EU-financed STM-Project. The PortCDM concept aims among other things to enhance collaboration in port operations to make port calls more efficient and synchronized, and thereby environmentally friendly, by enabling the different actors involved in the port call to share data in a standardised format - the PortCallMessageFormat. The collaboration between the students and the project was enabled through a five-week project course where the students together with representatives from PortCDM designed, implemented and demonstrated actor-specific systems.

During the demonstration the audience representing the various actors in the port of Gothenburg saw among many things how a Captain of a vessel bound for the Port of Gothenburg could provide different time stamps, both estimates and actuals, for its planned port call through the innovative Android app while the terminal organisations used web applications to respond with estimates for berth availability and cargo operations.

The collaboration, orchestrated by RISE Viktoria, highlighted the possibilities for third-party development of maritime IT solutions utilising the PortCDM message protocol.

After the demonstration, one student team reported that the course was the most engaging and challenging in their three years as bachelor students while another team expressed gratitude for finally getting to work on a real challenge with non-academic stakeholders, 'Thanks for giving us the opportunity to participate'.